Posted
by
michael
on Wednesday February 11, 2004 @02:33PM
from the hello-to-the-FDNY-Hell's-Kitchen-company dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Germany's local and city councils have been pioneering the migration from Windows to Linux. Now, one of the IT staff behind one move has revealed how they persuaded workers to accept the changes. Stuffed toy penguins and Linux t-shirts helped to create an open-source love-in at the council offices, and they got a senior chairwoman to demonstrate the new system to the troops. Male ego stopped anyone claiming that Linux was difficult to use, once they'd seen that the 'weaker sex' could master it :)"

Anyone watch that "The Apprentice" show. Two groups of 8 people, men on one side, women on the other. The first four tasks, the women stumbled around like lost puppies for 3 of them and yet won every time. The catch, they gave out thier phone number, while selling Lemonade for 10 bucks a cup. The guys couldn't sell jack.

It's not surprizing that having a woman demo Linux, people are interested in learning.

Marketing is something Linux needs. Of course, that's the weak point for a lot of open source.

Tux toys & t-shirts sound trivial, but they loosen people up about something that a lot of non-tech types think is "hard". Setting up the "sexist" argument ("Even the women can use this OS") is even appropriate if that's what it takes to make decision-makers come around.

Despite all the claims of 'monopoly' scarcely anyone steps back and REALLY analyzes why open source hasn't taken hold. And the answer inevitably leads to little or no marketing. A good product that no one knows about won't be used.

The problem *really* is, most "marketing" is centered around lying or pushing around half-truths, so people hear only what they want to hear about a given new product.

If "marketing" really equated with "teaching people about the product", advertisements would point out all the pluses AND minuses.

Linux lacking "marketing" is probably partially because open source developers don't stand to benefit in the long run if everyone goes around heralding their unfinished work as the ultimate solution to a problem. Folks find out it's not, and then they're soured to the whole project. Developers, unlike businesses, are just concerned with building the best product they can build. Marketing is about generating *sales* and bringing in the maximum amount of *profit*. These aren't an integral part of the Linux requirements for existance.

Dependency Hell is NOT negated by APT and Yum. [...]
I ended up with over fifty things that I had to reinstall, to get my computer back in order after THAT fuckup.

Um, you've got a seriously FUBAR apt configuration if that's happening to you. I would suggest unfscking your/etc/apt/preferences for a start...

Seriously, the only time this sort of thing happens is when you're running Unstable or, especially, mixing Unstable packages into a Stable or Testing system -- and then you're intentionally putting yourself on the bleeding edge. The one exception I can recall is the recent and well-documented problem with the switch to GTK2-based Galeon; that only affected Testing, too, not Stable. And it was resolved in a few days; we just used Firebird in the interim.

While in a large sense I do agree, I nonetheless think it's going to be a help to desktop adoption. Just getting name recognition from TV in a lot of ways might act as a validator. Putting a whole new system on one's most expensive applience is a pretty daunting experience for a lot of people, and I think many of them would be reassured that their TV has told them that this Linux thing isn't just a toy used by geeks, but rather a real professional IBM thing. They might not yet know to ask for it, but if someone suggests it as a solution and explains what it is, it might give them the extra bit of confidence to try.

Though in any case, even word of mouth seems to be doing pretty well. I'm finding it more common for people to mention thinking about using Linux - OK, not huge common, but the fact that it's turning up at all in conversation with non computer geeks is amazing to me.

That's true, but part of the reason that Open source doesn't go in for marketing is that that's not the point. It's software to solve a specific problem, and if it solves other people's problems, so much the better. Marketing will potentially help the end users become aware of the software, but it really doesn't do the software any good or harm if people know about it or not.

Commercial software on the other hand, is simply to make money for companies. This is not a bad thing; simply the way the market

To see a woman demonstrating software? I mean, I assume they didn't put her on the stage and say thinks like "Hey! *Even* women can go this!". It was a 'by example' thing. So the women and non-chauvanistic men would be offended...why?

I wonder if it would help the decision makers to know that not only does my 8 yr old girl use linux, she prefers mandrake over fedora. Not that it is saying much, but she installed and updated Mandrake 9.2 this weekend with very little guidance. If she can do it, so should any grown man. Man, I beam with pride everytime I see my little girl use the command line.

Somehow it leaves me feeling a little uneasy, though. I bet I'd be influenced by the same or similar tactics, even though I've read this article. It leaves my ego a bit worse for the wear to know that I (hell, we!) am so easily swayed by savvy marketing techniques.

Example: even if janet jackson winds up paying fines for her Super Bowl stunt, I'll bet she gets exactly what she intended in terms of sales and publicity. The people she pissed off were never her customers anyway.

She was disappearing from the public radar.She was loosing her celebrity status.

On Tuesday following the half time show she was:on the cover of 8 different magazines at B&Non the cover of a number of local papersin the headlines on more magazines and paperson every news castin various articles inside the various media formats

AND,
her name continues to be brought up in obscure places like slashdot.

The article spends a fair amount of time talking about how they dealt with their proverbial "sticks in the mud" and talking about a few of the benefits of running linux vs. Windows, and then finishes up with the following paragraph:

Late on Tuesday, Microsoft issued a patch for a vulnerability in its Windows software that could be used to unleash a virus even more devastating than MyDoom. This patch should be installed by anyone running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP o

Just a few minutes ago, Aunt Tilley taught me how to compile my 1st kernel, & when I asked her a question, she refused to answer. I can't remember what she said exactly, but was something to do with man pages, howtos & Google.

Not that it's a great sales tactic: "You don't need that wimpy ease-of-use"

Gotta keep the spin "Easy enough for *her*, so you can certainly handle it."

Yeah, well despite all the lipservice for equality, there's still plenty of cavemen who think only a man can do such-and-such. A remarkable comment on futuristic magazine ads, back in the 50's, projected the lady of the house still doing all the work, just with more high-tech, work-saving tools. Watch day-time TV and the message that men and women have the same roles from back then is still there.

Good leverage. Works with racism as a motivator, too. "Hey, that (insert ethnicity here) can do pretty good with a (insert tool here), guess I better be able to do as well or my arguments of everyone being inferior to (insert own ethnic group here) falls flat."

Americans tend to have a lot of levers, thanks to lingering puritanical attitudes (watch the super bowl half time show?;-) Careful how you try to apply them at work, though. The spin that "she can do it, so anyone should be" could land your butt on the sidewalk.

PHB's OTOH could probably care less. Hit them with the true TCO and they're half in the pocket. Problem I've run into is most have this dinosaur attitude that Microsoft makes everything easier. If only...

After all, i'd much rather prompt the girls to play with my tarballs and give my extension a header first (as long as they don't byte). Then they can finger eachother and play with their nodes while I cool off, before we all compile. I won't dev into the core details, but it would involve loading a large driver and lots of fscking and !banging.

A former company did a rather large booth a COMDEX a few years ago. They planned it a bit late so the more attractive of the Booth Marketting Persons were already obligated to other companies. One of the women was as much fun as a brick in the desert.

The other woman had a great personality and eventually she stopped giving out post cards demonstrating a technical application to victi... potential customers. It was amazing how much more attentive the demonstratee was with her. I don't know if it's becau

When Art Fry, the inventor of Post-It notes, first attempted to pitch the innovation at 3-M he received a lukewarm response. He then distributed samples to some 3-M secretaries who quickly found new uses for them . It's now one of the 5 top-selling office products.

Or we can try Alice's (from Dilbert) methodology: Instead of booth babes to attract people to your booth get RMS and/or Linus (Dilbert, Wally) to stand in front of Microsoft's booth wearing nothing but a string of floss.

I always help -- I guess I "get" the concept that I can lift more than almost any woman -- something about testosterone and being a lumberjack in my youth.

But if you can't lift more than they can, by all means send them along to somebody that can.

Oh, and just because they are using a trick on you doesn't mean they don't need your help. Just smile and say "Sure, but next time just ask instead of playing the mind games." Being a jerk doesn't allow you to change behaviour -- or get dates for that matter.

Actually I tend to do what you recommend (say "just ask"). I am after all a rather big fellow. But if they use the blatant "poor wittle me can't do anything for myself" technique, I'm liable to be a jerk, yeah. (nor, for the record, do I want to date someone who pulls that shit:) )

you don't want every other women within earshot saying "asshole" under her breath

Actually, I do. Assholes get laid. "Nice guys" don't. Sorry.

Speaking as a "nice guy" I call bullshit.

Every woman will have a different set of criteria for finding you attractive or unattractive.

I really ought to write a book or at least a HOWTO. In the meantime let me suggest two behaviours that will help:

1. Honesty. This is a challenge: the most important thing is to be honest with yourself which is _really_ difficult. I'm lucky enough to have been with women who've told me honestly what I needed to improve on. I'm still working on it;)2. Assertiveness. From my experience most (not all) women don't like a guy to be too submissive. They like a dude to have a spine. This doesn't mean you should be nasty and forceful, just don't be a doormat. Some women like to wear the pants in a relationship but most seem to not appreciate being forced into that position.

What, you haven't seen the "She thinks Tux is cute" ads, etc. Ok, maybe you're a subscriber. Offtopic, but I never told./ my gender, yet the ads *always* feature women. You don't have to put 4 together to be a bit suspicious of the gender balance there...

This is hardly a technology issue. Human beings are social in nature and therefore we all experience social pressures. It's a fact of being alive. To ignore the fact that women and men are different is assine.

Using marketing is only natural. It works, and it works very well is all aspects of life, not just technology.

No, but the flipside of the "marketing" they
are pushing is that women can't do things with
computers that aren't "easy".

I think a lot of Slashdotters have read
more into this story than they should...

They deliberately choose a spokeswoman based on
pushing the "If she can do it, so can I" male
ego button. The reverse of that, which you
suggest they also pushed, does not hold true.
If the implicit sexism didn't exist, their
approach simply would not have worked.

I don't know if it is in our genes, or if it's a product of our environment, but male ego resulting from male dominance even affects me a ton.

I was running on a treadmill earlier this week, and there was a girl who was running on one next to me at the same time, at roughly the same speed. There was _no_ way I was going to let myself stop before she did--because she was a girl. And I recognized this as I was running.

Seems kind of silly, I know, but that's what was in my head.

*I've heard that posting anonymously at slashdot isn't really, so what's the difference?

when I'm out running along a well used path in my town, there is no fucking way I can live with a woman running infront of me. At times this put me close to a heart-attack. But I have all the more fun because this kind of stuff. Same thing, when I try to overtake someone who is barely slower than me. heh.

Man, this is oart of the fun of life! As long as you realize, that your life does not depend on being cooler/stronger/faster/whatever I consider it good-natured fun. After all, where would be in technology without some good ol' testosterone-driven competition?

plus, women have some fun --uhm, let's call them characteristics to laugh about

Gee, are you suggesting that certain human behavior is hardwired into our psyche? Just like every single other mammal on the planet? And you're just now realizing this??

You can either accept that you're an animal with instincts, and learn how to control them/live with them, or you can deny your basic nature and keep banging your head against the wall. The choice is yours. The upshot on the former is, everyone else is governed by those same instincts, so you can use them to help get people to do what you want them to.

I don't like that if a girl can do it, any man can...I can do a lot of things with a computer that many men can't do. I work hard to learn all that I can and I don't like that when I am up against a man, everyone automatically listens to what he says over me. I know what I'm talking about, I've been using computers longer than everyone that I know. When I go into a computer store all the clerks swarm to help the poor, defenseless, dumb girl buy expensive things for her computer. It really bugs me. Don't question my intelligence, I know what I'm doing.

I think its an excellent way to market linux to a bunch of men, but it still bugs me that people think like that.

Until the last coupla millenia (centuries? decades?) , the primary social skill in our species has been dominance, usually physical. Most men are stronger than most women... we just carry these assumptions over into other fields. Old habits die hard.

That said, if I have the choice, I prefer a female tech/mechanic/(fill in typically-male-job) because they tend to be the best, having had to overcome bias AND having had the guts to stick with it.

I had a similar experience, only it was with two people: a tatooed woman and a midget. The midget didn't last too long, but he surprised me. I felt pretty relieved when the woman got off the treadmill. I quickly got off my cross-trainer and felt even more relieved when I saw that she had merely moved to a cycle after getting off the treadmill. Then I realised I was secretly competing with a tatooed lady and a midget. I promptly shrunk my hands, bathed in cabbage, and joined a carnival.

I went to the gym the other day to do some weight training and I wanted to get warmed up first. I decided that a gentle jog on the treadmill would get the blood moving. As soon as I started jogging a really pretty girl got on the treadmill next to me and started running and I ended running a lot faster and longer than I had originally intended to and my weight training suffered because of it.

The worst part is that I knew exactly what I was doing, but I did it anyway.

Hehe. Take it from me, unless you're a world class athlete, there is always a cute little 18 year-old girl who do it better than you. Get over it.:-)

I learnt this fact of life allready when I was 16, and I think it probably helped me avoid a too-inflated ego...: It was at the end of one of my first mountain triathlon, and after three hours of running a was totally exhausted. Just before the final hard climb, there was this girl, one year younger than me, who just parked me completely.

You bet, if you meet one of those one the threadmill next to you, and you awaken her competition instinct, you'll find yourself dying at the end of the threadmill at the end of the day...:-)

Oddly enough, I recently saw this in Doctorow's "East Coast Tribe", but this was something I learned when I first worked in an IT department.

It doesn't matter if your systems are uber-fast. It doesn't matter if they have a low error rate. It doesn't matter if they are made to be user friendly.

If the users of those systems perceive they are slow, inefficient, hard to use, great, best machines ever - whatever they percieve, that is the reality.

So a good IT staff does two things:

1. Work on their C. I. A. pieces.2. Work to help the users percieve their systems as being C. I. A. good.

Let's face it - this is why Microsoft is on 90-odd% of all desktop systems out there: people percieve their systems as working, as easy to use, and that everything else is inferior whether that is true or not.

Once you convince them that a Linux or Mac desktop works just as well - if not faster and more securely - on their desk as a Windows box, and that they can use the same kinds of applications, you're set.

I've had IT guys whom I respect greatly tell me they'd love to switch to "OS X", but don't want to because they fear the "learning curve". It's not a "noobie" issue at all - perception clouds everything.

And Brauner made the right calls. To those who had problems, he showed them how it was easy. To those who thought he was being mean, he displayed himself as a "fun guy" with shirts and toys. To those who thought the system was "hard" he showed a secretary doing her job with ease - the person that all my programming teachers taught me to program interface for, since "if a secretary can run it, anybody can".

Excellent work on his part for recognizing that the human element is as important as the technical one at times.

I can just see the marketing people on the other side *cough* those convicted monopolists, remember them ? the guys who claim the GPL should be stamped out ? *cough* making hay with this.. ?

"Ooh, we don't manipulate you", they'll coo. "We just give you a product that you know and is easy to use". And heck, if that doesn't work, they'll just add a whopping discount on top of it to seal the bargain.

Maybe I'm just egotistic myself, but if I heard that I had been manipulated into something I wasn't sure about, and if I heard about it later on (with a "ha ha ha. owned!" comment, to boot), I'd be quite wary of the next thing that particular guy tried to foist on me.

Which brings me to the question.. does OSS really need marketshare like this ? It's just me, probably, but I'd prefer people make an informed choice rather than go "hey, why don't we use this because we don't want to be outdone/look foolish". If you can convince people to install it that easily, they'll just as easily be swayed by the next marketing gimmick, and which side (OSS or the other guys) have more marketing muscle ?

For a long time, I've been a huge proponent of ease-of-use. While I respected Linux from a technical perspective, I've long been dissapointed in it from an ease-of-use perspective.

That all changed the last time I tried Linux. Knoppix, to be exact. It was jaw-droppingly impressive to me: the hardware recognition; the ease-of-use; the clean interface (KDE, in this case, though I suspect GNOME is just as nice); everything was polished and smooth.

And then it hit me, there are only two things stopping Linux from making deep inroads into the desktop market these days:

1. Drivers, drivers, drivers. Not enough hardware makers are bothering with drivers for Linux. Kudos to all the Linux folks writing drivers, but Linux is always at least a step or two behind. However, this problem may be solved if the project that allows Windows drivers to work under Linux is successful.

My hope is that the low cost of Linux will keep driving people into its loving arms.

So...how does this post apply to the topic at hand? Simple: anyone who has given modern distributions of Linux a chance already knows what I know: Linux is just as easy to use as Windows these days (or close enough that it doesn't matter), and the only thing holding Linux back now are the two items I listed above. Anyone who claims modern distributions of Linux are too hard to use probably shouldn't be using computers at all.

1. Drivers, drivers, drivers. Not enough hardware makers are bothering with drivers for Linux. Kudos to all the Linux folks writing drivers, but Linux is always at least a step or two behind. However, this problem may be solved if the project that allows Windows drivers to work under Linux is successful.

Frankly, I don't want most hardware makers to be writing lots of Linux drivers. I want them to build their stuff to use documented protocols (USB/Firewire/IDE/etc.) correctly so that their hardware Just Works everywhere. That way, I can pick up a piece of new hardware and have it run without any obnoxious CD loading, file downloading or kernel module installation whatsoever.

My wife mastered it after a year away from OS/2. I have a half-blind neighbor who is getting there, coming from being a 12:00 flasher on Windoze. Many people in the group I hang out with is involved with this, and many of *them* aren't that technically inclined.

The problem with migration from windows to linux is really a question of what you are used to. People gripped a lot when microsoft made its migration from windows 3.11 to windows 95. They could not find their programs, screensaveers, etc.etc. The gnome or kde desktops with koffice work just fine. They may not contain all the bells and whistles of microsoft products but they are fully functional. They may have trouble with printers or external devices but I have to show one lady how to print to a different printer on her machine on a weekly basis. Users will get used to anything. After all they got used to haveing to restart twice a day. Personally for me a move to linux would reduce the number of virus ladden emails I can't convince them not to open. It would also reduce the spyware I have to clean off weekly.

A similar strategy was used in WW2 to get pilots to accept the B29 bomber, which was considered difficult to fly.The male pilots decided that it was flyable when a crew of female pilots were trained to fly it.

Is responsible for the adoptation of Linux. Bear with me here.
The idea of women being the 'weaker sex' is a product of the 1000+ year old war on pagan goddess worship waged by the Catholic Church. Women in ancient times were revered as sacred vessels of fertility. Constantine, later rulers and the Catholic Popes did their best to destroy the idea of goddess worship and make the women a secondary being, which was a major factor in shaping our society today.

So when men are amazed at women's ability to use Linux, their amazement can be attributed to the work of the early Roman Catholic Church, which continues today.

IFO was sold on Linux not by a woman, but by a penguin. I don't know how where the Church comes in there. The nuns in the catholic school I went to as a kid looked a lot like penguins. But I was never attracted to them. Really.

The idea of women being the 'weaker sex' is a product of the 1000+ year old war on pagan goddess worship waged by the Catholic Church.

Well, well, trolling against a religious group I see... I'm not in the habit of defending organised religion, but you're making my bullshit radar go off the chart.

Women in ancient times were revered as sacred vessels of fertility. Constantine, later rulers and the Catholic Popes did their best to destroy the idea of goddess worship and make the women a secondary being, which was a major factor in shaping our society today.

Yeah, next you're gonna claim that women had the right to vote in Athens huh?

First of all, Judaism started a pogrom against godess worship 3 thousand years before that.

Secondly, women have been considered the weaker sex in china and japan for aeons too, where they hadn't even heard of the Catholic church. Women in china and japan were forbidden from learning to write, so they had to make up their own "women's language". Hiragana and Katakana in japan, and I forget the name of the chineese one.What, did the catholic church pray for the heatens to embrace that woman-bellitteling you pretend they invented?

And finally, the reason women are considered the weaker sex is because they are weaker. Is the roman catholic church also responsible for secretly weakening female olympians so that they would systematically achive lower performances than that of the mens? What secret roman catholic magic powers did they use to accomplish that? The gap has been shortening in recent decades thanks to illicit drugs and homone treatments (see the east-germany women's olympic swimming team from 1976 and 1980...scary!), but women still lift less, swim and run slower, etc.

SuSE is a logical choice given that it's a German company but this is part of a much larger [eweek.com] move towards Open Source by the German government, which has been going on for some time now. They did a deal with IBM to let agencies buy IBM hardware and SuSE software at discounts competitive with MS. They are doing this, according to the Interior Minister, because "We raise the level of IT security by avoiding monocultures, we lower the dependency on single software vendors, and we reach costs savings in software and operation costs."

The difference with MS is that while using SuSE, due to the nature of Open Source they are not tied to and reliant on a single vendor. This is just the latest town to so convert, albeit with interesting staff-persuasion tactics!

How about this approach... "Use the damned software!". Really, I dont know why people seem to think they should have complete freedom on a computer at work. The company owns the machine, and the company chooses the software... so long as the company involved the proper employees in evaluating which is the best software(s) to use... thats it, end of story. Employees really shouldnt have a choice one way or another.

Ever heard the phrase "you attract more flies with honey than vinegar?" Honestly, I'd rather work for someone who is respectful of my concerns and seeks to answer them (even in a devious way), than someone who just scoffs at them and says "Shut up and get back to work." Even the military, the only employer who can throw you in jail or have you shot for not doing what you're told, tends to be relatively light handed in how it encourages its members to use new systems.

Is there any subject in existance where the Male Ego doesn't apply?
Most people are sheep. They follow the rules of society without thought and most of them wouldn't even realise they are following set rules.
Men and women have their roles to play, and any deviation is seen as weird and undesirable.
Wear a pin

Deciphering all the typos in that post was an interesting experience...

Regardless, the main point - that a corporation is a dictatorship - is factually correct. However, if you treat your employees as if they have no valuable opinions on the tools they will be using to do their jobs, then you will lose buy in, and have a revolt.

The employees aren't exactly going to be turning up at their manager's door with pitch-forks and flaming torches, but they are going to be grumbling, moaning, bitching, whining, and likely looking for another job. Successful companies retain staff by ensuring they feel valued.

Basically, treating your employees like shit gets you nothing but shit employees. Acting in a dictatorial manner simply because you can simply creates more problems than it solves. It is vital in large scale change projects to ensure that people at least feel like they've been consulted, even if you end up ignoring everything they've said.

The productivity lost in replacing numbers of employees would be far more costly than simply throwing some toy penguins and a blonde bimbo into the equation.

I am, of course, assuming that once the buy in was created by the "weaker sex" and toy penguin strategy there is sufficient training and backup in place - without which the entire project is doomed to failure anyway.

I cant imagine this being a very successful company, when they have to use bribes and sex to encourage the employees to use a tool you've mandated.

Right, that's a good management style. Make unilateral, completely unpopular decisions with no effort to win people over or assuage their fears. Great management style. In general, having employees not hate management is a good thing. Especially since all it cost here was a couple of t-shirts and stuffed toys.